Friday, March 28, 2014

On New Year’s Day I
became a parent, sparking my curiosity in the research on parenting and
well-being and inspiring a four-part series on parenthood and happiness. This
is the second post. Check out the first post here.

Are parents happier
than non-parents? Researchers have generally set about trying to answer
this deceptively simple question in three ways:

Are people with children happier than those without children?

This is the most common approach to research on parenthood
and well-being. In these studies, researchers typically tackle large datasets
with thousands of adults, comparing the well-being of people with children to
people without children. Although the approach is straightforward, the results
are mixed with some studies finding parents are happier than non-parents and other
studies find the reverse.

How can these studies with such a basic design find opposite
results? One large problem with this approach is that little work is
done to find out who exactly is making up these groups of parents and
non-parents. Focusing on the non-parents, only 15% of adults do not have
children, making them a small comparison group. More importantly, their reasons
for doing so may differ greatly. Young adults may not have children when they
take part in the research, but plan to have children later. Older adults may
not have children because they were not able to do so, or they may have
consciously made the choice to not have children. Imagine comparing a married 48-year
old with three children to a married 48 year-old with no children who spent
years and hard earned dollars fighting infertility and wishing to be a parent?
Who do you think is happier? Now imagine that the non-parent comparison is a 48
year-old who loves to travel, lives all over the globe and chose not to have
children because they wouldn’t fit a globetrotting lifestyle. Who do you think
is happier? In one study, mothers were no happier than women who chose not to
have children, but were significantly happier than infertile women (Callan,
1987). Choice plays an important role on the other side of the table as well—some
people become parents by choice while others find themselves in the unexpected
position of being a parent when they hadn’t intended it. How might choice
affect happiness among these different groups?

Are people happier after they have children than they were before they
were parents?

Thursday, March 20, 2014

This is the first post in a
four-part series on parenthood and happiness.

On New Years Day I celebrated not only the start of a new
year, but a new phase in my life. A few (long) hours after midnight I became a parent, and my
life was irrevocably changed. In the journey to parenthood I knew one thing to be true—that I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Would becoming a
parent bring me joy, love, and gratitude greater than I had previously known? Would
I find myself anxious, worried, depressed, and dreaming of my former life? Or,
as I suspected, would I find myself experiencing intense moments of both?

In my short time as a parent I have experienced great joy,
love and gratitude as well as intense worry, and sometimes even sadness. Happily,
as I sit here typing up this post with my two and a half month old swaddled
next to me on the couch, eyeing me trustingly as she falls in and out of sleep,
I can say that the balance tends to weigh strongly on the side of joy. But in
those moments where I don’t have the luxury to type up this post because I’m
tending to a crying child, or changing a dirty diaper, I dream of the freedom
of my former life and the balance is just a bit more evenly weighted.

And the one thing I know with certainty is that I still have
no clue what exactly I’ve gotten myself into. While my days often stretch out in
front of me with the sameness that comes from having an infant with simple
needs, I also know that she is growing and changing at a rapid pace. Each week
we are in uncharted territory as she learns to smile, sit, and eventually walk,
talk and push back as she becomes her own independent person.

Thursday, March 13, 2014

Do you remember your elementary school science project? Mine was about ant poison. I mixed borax with sugar and put that mixture outside our house during the summer in a carefully crafted/aesthetically pleasing "ant motel." My prediction, I think, was that we would kill ants just like in the conventional ant killing brands, but we'd do so in an aesthetically pleasing way. In retrospect, not sure I was cut out for science back then.

Anyway, from what I remember about that process, there was a clear study design and articulation of a hypothesis--a prediction about what I expected to happen in the experiment. Years later, I would learn more about hypothesis testing in undergraduate and graduate statistical courses on my way to a social psychology PhD. For that degree, Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) would be my go-to method of inferential statistics.